Theresa May will lead us into a bleak future

Martin Kettle has an insightful comment on current division within Tory government's approach to Brexit. Not for or against, but which gets priority, controlling immigration (No 10) or free market (treasury).

Since No 10 will ultimately win that battle, the question is how the Treasury will react. In its determination to maintain the City of London’s global position outside the single market, the Treasury will find itself inexorably drawn down the road towards remaking the UK as an offshore, low-tax financial haven. Just at the very moment when the EU locks horns with Apple over sweetheart tax deals, so Britain may roll out the welcome mat to international corporations such as Apple, offering Britain as the new Ireland, or as a European Singapore.

Cameron and Antibiotic Resistance

Cameron does something important and starts to look into the threat of antibiotic resistance.

But he puts an economist in charge of the project with an explicit assumption its an economic problem that industry has failed to invent more antibiotics.

So lets see if the committee starts recommending the banning of antibiotics in intensive farming practices or if they just come with recommendations to extend "intellectual property" rights or other incentives for big pharma companies.

UK Anti-Terror Police Sent After a 12 Year Old Planning To Protest

Terror squad yanks 12-year-old out of class over plan to protest at David Cameron's office.

Tory Polluters Win Energy Bill

BBC News - Government delays setting carbon target until after election

How does one read this?

Tories

a) refuse to commit to CO2 reduction
b) as a "compromise" continue to commit to funding of alt.energy
c) I bet that that alt.energy includes nuclear, hence the Tories plan to funnel money to their friends in nuclear industry

Crap.

Read Polly Toynbee against Tory NHS reforms.

Hey Phil. How are you voting on the AV issue in the referendum?

Hmmm ... not 100% committed either way at the moment. I think both systems have their strengths and weaknesses.

I agree with @unloveablesteve that this is a highly misleading propaganda against AV.

If you do want to understand something about AV here's a great resource with in-browser simulation of the effects of different voting systems.

I guess I like a lot of the warm fuzzy things that AV is meant to stand for. Opening up the space for smaller parties who might challenge the status quo. Letting those nice cuddly LibDems ... oh sorry ... well, potentially letting some nice cuddly politicians into shared government to temper the excesses of the big bad main parties.

Like everyone, I'm bitterly disappointed with the LibDems in the coalition. I think that the only thing that they should do is walk out of it, today, join Labour in a vote of no confidence against the government, allow it to fall and we'll restart the whole thing. Hopefully with people giving enough power back to Labour to stop the Tory cut-machine.

But, having said that, I don't entirely blame the LibDems for their inability to resist the Tory agenda. The Conservatives played them very cleverly. And it's not clear how much power they really have as a minority party in government.

I'm guessing that the same would be the case even under AV. Remember how under Blair, power was getting increasingly centralised with him, even against the wishes of his cabinet? How much does AV for representatives matter when prime-minister is an increasingly presidential role?

Actually, you know what, I think I just talked myself into it. I haven't the energy or the heart to try to construct some kind of real rationale for voting against AV, so I guess I'll just support it.

What's wrong with the Big Society?

Another way of putting this .. there's a lot that's right about the idea of a Big Society where people get involved in running their communities in a more decentralised and autonomous way. But what's wrong is the context of "Capitalism" ie. an economic system with a dominant Capitalist class who are focussed on vacuuming up all the possible surplus wealth for themselves. As long as the capitalist is trying to extract all the surplus value generated by society (by requiring most people to work long hours to earn a modicum of comfort) there'll never be the capacity available for any community to live comfortably.

(More on Dillow, of course.)

Guardian :

An analysis of local authority documents reveals that the number of council redundancies directly resulting from the coalition's austerity measures is expected to break the 100,000 mark by early in the new year, fuelled by the swingeing cuts announced this week to councils' budgets and the pressure to start cutting before the new financial year in April.

Update : Meanwhile, the government's smash-and-grab raid on the state continues, as it rushes to hand over serious powers to Britain's oligarchs.

A number of business heavyweights were appointed as non-executive directors to beefed-up boards of government departments to help the coalition implement its efficiency drive.

For the first time, boards will be able to ask the prime minister to sack permanent secretaries, the most senior civil servants, if they fail to fulfil their mandates, such as meeting departmental budget targets.

So, government welfare reforms are released.

I'm not entirely against them. I think it would be a good idea to simplify the system and reduce the number of different types of payments. I also agree with the attempt to eliminate the "poverty trap", so that getting a job doesn't immediately result in a large drop in benefits.

However, we'll see whether these good things are any more than a cover for the main workfare agenda of forcing people into underpaid (below minimum wage) and exploitative (no security, no rights) labour by threatening to remove benefits.

If the first two of these things are good (and I agree they are) we could have them without the workfare part. If the workfare is a genuine (though I'd still say, misguided) belief that free-riders are a problem let's see some real guarantees that the innocent won't get caught up by the punishment (eg. that benefits won't be withdrawn from the "workshy" if there are fewer than a certain number of decent vacancies in the home-town etc.)

T.U.C. Bloggers on Workfare (my emphasis) :

We oppose workfare on both moral and practical grounds. The most important moral objection to workfare is that unemployed people are not responsible for their unemployment: they are the victims in this story, not the villains. People who have been made redundant and young people who have not been able to get a job since leaving school did not cause the economic crisis and the number of unemployed people has not risen so steeply because there are 700,000 more lazy people than there used to be. But workfare is being imposed as if people on JSA were the “workshy” of today’s Mail and Telegraph headlines.

Workfare is unfair to unemployed people because it requires them to work in return for their JSA – the amount of JSA you get depends on your family circumstances. If a job is worth doing it is worth being paid the rate for the job, but even the highest levels of benefit will still leave people working for an hourly rate well below the national minimum wage – the rate we have established as the minimum to avoid exploitation.

Workfare is unfair to disabled people – hundreds of thousands of people currently receiving Incapacity Benefit are being re-tested, using a much tougher medical test. A large majority of them will be left with no alternative but to claim Jobseeker’s Allowance. Because of discrimination against disabled people and the fact that opportunities in our society are still inaccessible in many ways, they are more likely to find themselves on the benefit for a long time. Disabled people will therefore be disproportionately likely to find themselves subjected to workfare.

For the same reason, lone parents are going to be hit by this reform: since October, lone parents whose youngest child is aged 7 or over have been required to claim Jobseeker’s Allowance. Childcare is still hard to arrange, jobs that are flexible enough to be combined with school hours are comparatively rare and so lone parents are likely to find themselves unemployed for longer periods and therefore likely to have workfare applied to them.

Workfare is unfair to people in work: workers doing jobs comparable to those undertaken by the workfare conscripts will effectively be in competition for their jobs. In some cases, this will lead to them losing their jobs; even when this does not happen, the competition will serve to hold down pay and terms and conditions. This is not only unfair, it is hardly what the economy needs at a time of depressed demand. Some people find it hard to sympathise with workers in this position, but a thought experiment may help: imagine that someone who has been working in the same occupation as yourself is made redundant and then required to do the same job, but for £65 a week. Would you think that was fair to them or to you?

Workfare is unfair to some businesses. Businesses and self-employed people working in the same field as the JSA claimants who do not have this subsidised labour will find themselves losing contracts.

The motivation of unemployed people is not the cause of mass unemployment. Research during the recessions of the 1980s and 90s found that, if anything, unemployed people have a stronger attachment to employment than people in work. Unemployed people are less likely to be happy than people in employment; they are likely to suffer from depression and other mental illnesses, and more likely to suffer the longer they have been unemployed. It is very unlikely that people would deliberately choose a state that had this effect.

The biggest problem face – as Douglas Alexander points out in an excellent article in today’s Independent – is that there simply aren’t enough jobs to go round. According to the latest labour market statistics, there are 2,448,000 unemployed people, 2,405,000 “economically inactive” people who say they want jobs and 1,137,000 working in part-time jobs who want to work full-time. On the other side of the equation, there are 459,000 job vacancies. Even if we limit our comparison to unemployed people, there are more than 5 unemployed people for every job vacancy; before the recession, this ratio was normally around 3:1.

Tories bring back the workhouse.

Update : Some good comments at BBC.

2. At 01:40am on 07 Nov 2010, Marnok wrote:
If there is a job there to be done, pay someone to do it. Don't treat valuable work as a form of punishment. If the job needs doing, pay someone to do it so they can earn a living and hold their head high. When manual work is treated as some kind of a punishment for the sin of being unemployed, it demeans all manual work, shows that government has a poor opinion of workers, and belittles those "forced" to work who have in all likelihood been forced into the depressing state of long-term unemployment.

6. At 01:46am on 07 Nov 2010, bujin wrote:
Cost of direct bank bailouts: £850bn
DWP estimated benefit fraud per year: £1bn

What about the benefit lifestyle the banksters are enjoying?

10. At 01:49am on 07 Nov 2010, Dada wrote:
Erm, why don't they just pay them the minimum wage to do that work? Or is this just a ploy to get cheap labour?

12. At 01:54am on 07 Nov 2010, Jon Cooper wrote:
What kind of compulsory community work is being considered?
cos I can see it being street cleaning and litter picking
so the paid council staff who should be doing those jobs turn up for work only to be told they aren't needed anymore, the 'unemployed' are being forced to do the work instead. Next thing they're down the jobcenter looking for work - with a fair chance that they could be back doing the same job they just lost, but for benefits instead of wages.

K-Punk on the Bullingdon Boys.

Hat-tip Mum

Tory tax-dodger looks for public spending efficiencies. :-(

Toynbee has the grim perspective.

Stumbling and Mumbling : What structural deficit?

BBC :

Shadow foreign secretary William Hague said they agreed economic stability would be key to any agreement.

Remember "economic stability" is a code-word here for, "reassuring the markets" (because who else out there is creating instability *except* the markets?)

This, in turn, means, "demonstrating to lenders that repaying them takes priority over taking care of British citizens" which, in its own turn, means "making dramatic, theatrically visible, cuts to government services".

For the Lib Dems to agree that economic stability is key, therefore, means for Liberal Democrats agree not to challenge or vote against Tory cuts to public services.

What the Tories are offering, to buy this quiescence isn't clear. They can't really offer Proportional Representation. Even offering a pathway towards it (such as a referendum) is a anathema to the majority of the party.

So, one of three things is about to happen :

a) the Tories are going to sucker the Lib Dems. They'll tell something to Clegg that he thinks is genuine progression towards PR. But then find a way to avoid delivering it.

b) Clegg is going to wimp-out. He's going to, knowingly accept, some vacuous promise from Cameron, out of fear of looking obstructive.

c) An attempt to form a Lib / Con coalition is going to fail.

Of course, like everyone else, I have no idea which it will be.